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This guide is a comprehensive resource for contributing
to Python – for both new and experienced contributors. It is
maintained by the same community
that maintains Python. We welcome your contributions to Python!

We encourage everyone to contribute to Python and that’s why we have put up this
developer’s guide. If you still have questions after reviewing the material in
this guide, then the Python Mentors group is available to help guide new
contributors through the process. The Developer FAQ is another
useful source of information.

It is recommended that the above documents be read in the order listed. You
can stop where you feel comfortable and begin contributing immediately without
reading and understanding these documents all at once. If you do choose to skip
around within the documentation, be aware that it is written assuming preceding
documentation has been read so you may find it necessary to backtrack to fill in
missing concepts and terminology.

Improving Python’s code, documentation and tests are ongoing tasks that are
never going to be “finished”, as Python operates as part of an ever-evolving
system of technology. An even more challenging ongoing task than these
necessary maintenance activities is finding ways to make Python, in the form of
the standard library and the language definition, an even better tool in a
developer’s toolkit.

While these kinds of change are much rarer than those described above, they do
happen and that process is also described as part of this guide:

This guide is specifically for contributing to the Python reference interpreter,
also known as CPython (while most of the standard library is written in Python,
the interpreter core is written in C and integrates most easily with the C and
C++ ecosystems).

There are other Python implementations, each with a different focus. Like
CPython, they always have more things they would like to do than they have
developers to work on them. Some major example that may be of interest are:

PyPy: A Python interpreter focused on high speed (JIT-compiled) operation
on major platforms

Jython: A Python interpreter focused on good integration with the Java
Virtual Machine (JVM) environment

IronPython: A Python interpreter focused on good integration with the
Common Language Runtime (CLR) provided by .NET and Mono